CIVIL ISLAM. Muslims and democratization in Indonesia. Robert W. Hefner. 286pp.

Princeton University Press; distributed in the UK by Wiley. Pounds 35 (paperback, Pounds 11.50). 0 691 05047 3.

Until the late 1980s, Islam made so little noticeable impact on Indonesia's politics that few outsiders were aware that this is in fact the world's largest Muslim country. Seven out of eight Indonesians are Muslims, making their numbers 200 million by the end of 2000, or more than those of all Arab countries combined. A large proportion of Indonesian Muslims adhere to syncretistic beliefs and practices (rituals relating to earth spirits, ancestor spirits, deities from the Hindu pantheon), and reject the formal obligations, such as daily prayer, that stricter Muslims consider essential to Islam. Since Clifford Geertz's classic study of Islam in an East Javanese town in the 1950s, it has become common to refer to these syncretists as abangan and to their stricter brothers as santri.

Indonesia's first two Presidents, Sukarno and Suharto, were both known to be abangan, and the state bureaucracy and military were long dominated by abangan and Christians. The latter, only some 8 per cent of the total population, were over-represented because of their better education, one of the lasting effects of Dutch colonization, the former because until recently few if any santri were ever promoted to the upper echelons of the state apparatus. Both Presidents, as well as the armed forces, deeply distrusted their santri Muslim subjects as a potential threat to the unity and integrity of the Republic, because of several early efforts to turn the country into an Islamic state.

President Sukarno kept power by carefully managing a balance between the armed forces and the two major mass-based political movements, Islam (santri) and Communism (abangan). General Suharto's rule started with the physical elimination of Communism, coordinated by his army but willingly carried out by Muslim killing squads. The only significant organized forces remaining then were the Muslim parties and associations, and efforts to depoliticize Islam have been one of the most consistent aspects of Suharto's policies. Protest against these policies and against the Suharto dictatorship in general was forcefully repressed; by the end of the 1980s, Muslim opposition was to all purposes silenced.

It looked like a dramatic reversal of these policies when, in the late 1980s, Suharto began gradually distancing himself from his erstwhile abangan and Christian allies (most visibly represented by his most powerful general, the Catholic Bennie Moerdani) and made overtures towards former Muslim critics. He allowed and even patronized the establishment of a new Muslim association,

ICMI, that had at least one clear political objective: affirmative action on behalf of educated santri, who had an acute awareness of being under-represented in economic, political and cultural life. The Christian ministers who had been in charge of the economy were, in 1992, replaced by Muslims, several generals of santri background were promoted to the highest positions, and Muslim civil servants found that joining ICMI was virtually obligatory for their careers.

Suharto moreover supported various efforts designed to give Islam a more prominent role in social and political life, such as an Islamic bank, a well-funded Muslim newspaper and a Muslim think tank -the latter two being alternatives to influential Catholic and Chinesecontrolled institutions that many Muslims had long perceived as hostile.

Whereas expressions of anti-Christian or anti-Chinese sentiment had in the past been swiftly and vigorously suppressed, radical Muslim groups that specialized in the assertive defence of Islam against perceived non-Muslim conspiracies appeared to enjoy high protection in the 1990s. They were among Suharto's staunchest supporters in his final days and later aggressively supported his first successor, Habibie, against the secular-oriented wings of the reform movement. Since the election of Abdurrahman Wahid to the presidency and the first cautious attempts to curb the still significant power of Suharto and his closest associates, such radical Muslim groups have proliferated and contributed much to the inter-religious conflicts that destabilized Wahid's government and now threaten that of his successor, Megawati.

Robert Hefner's important book, Civil Islam, is the most detailed study of Islam in the Suharto period to appear to date, and ICMI and the power struggles of the 1990s receive ample coverage. Hefner takes pains to show that that Islamization and democratization have come from committed Muslim intellectuals.

His rich descriptions show an awareness of the varied and conflicting interests of Suharto, Habibie, ICMI's Muslim intellectuals and the other actors involved in bringing Islam back into the public sphere. His chief emphasis is, however, on the gradual Islamization of public discourse that began well before Suharto gave his blessings to ICMI. He focuses especially on the development of liberal and tolerant Muslim discourses under the New Order, without which ICMI would not have been possible, whatever the political purposes it was designed to serve.

Hefner is an anthropologist with an interest in social history, who established his reputation with two excellent monographs on the Tengger, a Hindu community in East Java, and their abangan and santri Muslim neighbours. He observed there how the previously self- contained Hindu and abangan communities were little by little Islamicized, and he understood this to be a natural concomitant of their opening up and integration into a larger social and economic world. In this context, Islam stood, besides much else, for modernity and cosmopolitanism. In the 1990s, Hefner shifted his research interest to the role of Islam in the national public sphere, where he perceived analogous processes at work. Hence, probably, his focus on ICMI as the expression of an underlying process of modernizing Islamization.

Hefner writes with special sympathy on those influential currents in Indonesian Islam -represented most prominently by Nurcholish Madjid and Wahid -that advocate pluralism and tolerance and that have contributed significantly to the democratic reform movement, but he also discusses other currents, including some definitely uncivil ones. Most of his informants were ICMI activists, and he gives a clear view of the complexity of this part of the Islamic spectrum, where staunch Suharto supporters, principled opponents, pragmatic careerists, pious apolitical intellectuals and NGO activists intermingled. On the whole, I find his representation of the Muslim liberals a little too idyllic; he takes their words too often at face value and too uncritically reproduces their favourite self-image of a "smiling Islam" (as other Indonesian Muslims call it in self-mockery). The liberals could only flourish because of the Suharto regime, whose legitimizers and apologists they remained almost until the end.

ICMI as a whole, and not only those few members whom Hefner describes as "regimist", was much more part of the regime than Hefner's informants were willing to admit.

The most prominent Muslim opponent of ICMI was the always controversial Wahid, the leader of the "traditionalist" Nahdlatul Ulama, which probably is the largest Muslim organization in the world. In the 1990s, Wahid, who had long been by far the most interesting public personality in Indonesia, gradually grew into the most brilliant player in Indonesia's shadow-play politics. The efforts by Suharto and various military-Muslim coalitions to cut Wahid down to size, Wahid's own alliances with (mostly non-santri) pro-democracy actors (including Megawati) and secularist military figures, and his later accommodation with the Suharto family (at a price) constitute another important strand of Hefner's narrative.

In the course of the political power struggles of the mid-1990s, churches and Chinese shops were burnt down, as Muslim mobs went on the rampage in towns such as Situbondo, Banjarmasin and Tasikmalaya -not accidentally, places where Wahid's Nahdlatul Ulama is dominant. In each case, the arson and looting were started by unidentified groups brought in from outside, but local people later joined in. Wahid, perceiving a conspiracy to destroy him politically and to stigmatize his organization, made great efforts to restore trust between Christians and Muslims, and was quick to accuse his military and Muslim enemies, mentioning several of them by name. Hefner records Wahid's accusations, the substance of which was corroborated by later developments, with less scepticism than they were greeted with by most Indonesian journalists. There were military men and Muslim activists who deliberately incited ethnic and religious conflict as Suharto's reign was approaching its end. Hefner sketches the dirty politics of those final years, and notably the role that a handful of unsavoury Muslim activists in league with Muslim generals played in efforts to weaken or destroy Wahid's and Megawati's grassroots movements as well as the Chinese business elite.

The book ends with Suharto's fall in 1998 and therefore fails to discuss the rise of Abdurrahman Wahid to the presidency in October 1999 and his deposition in less than two years, and the civil war that broke out between Christians and Muslims in the Moluccas, leading to increasing radicalism among Muslims everywhere in the country. Readers will find the book quite helpful, nevertheless, in making these recent developments understandable.